A thorn by any other name

  I read a book about Buddhism once, and it talked about certain strategies to remain detached from things in life as a way of being more immune to loss. It was interesting to find this idea in such a different context from where I had heard it before, which is from Christians who criticize grieving people because they supposedly loved something too much in this world. The Christian judgers suggest that sadness or depression must surely be a form of idolatry and that it exposes a preference of worthless things over God.  The idea is that if people trusted in God instead of things like friends or insurance, then they would barely bat an eyelash when their whole life is ruined or when they were smashed by a steam roller or all their loved ones died.

  But my opinion is that as surely as it is okay to sit on a bench and trust it to hold you up the whole time, then it is okay to depend on both tangible and intangible resources in this world, and especially to love people so much that you would feel devastated for those attachments to even be weakened by a wrong word or a missed appointment, much less a permanent address change, or something horrible like death or disease.
   In fact, I think it is exactly a lazy lack of intense caring that would cause people to do something as mindless and spiritually inferior as telling others that it is better not to love.